De La Hoya Punishes Camacho

Oscar De La Hoya couldn’t realize his prediction of knocking out Hector Camacho. Instead, he settled for beating him up Saturday night at the Thomas & Mack Center.

De La Hoya ripped Camacho with punishing left hooks to the body, wobbled him several times and knocked him down in the ninth round with thunderous head shots to retain the WBC welterweight title on a unanimous decision.

“I’m very satisfied but I wanted to knock him out so bad,” De La Hoya said. “He did suffer for 12 rounds.”

A large majority of an estimated crowd of 14,100 fans left satisfied, too.

“I give him credit,” De La Hoya said. “He did take a good punch.”

Camacho took a lot of good punches. A CompuBox analysis credited De La Hoya with landing 373 of 750 punches, while Camacho landed 124 of 687. Of the punches De La Hoya landed, 340 were power blows. Camacho was credited with 54 power punches.

“I came out to fight,” Camacho said.

But the 35-year-old ended up just trying to survive.

“The kid is a very good student of boxing,” Camacho said of his 24-year-old opponent. “He was very sharp today, he earned it.”

Judge Anek Hongtongkam of Thailand scored it 118-108, John Keane of England saw it 120-106 and Chuck Giampa of Las Vegas scored it 120-105. The AP card favored De La Hoya 119-105.

“He was very tricky but I thought he was just trying to survive,” said De La Hoya, who made Camacho look like an old fighter. “He held on a lot, I thought I fought well.”

In the top undercard fight, Raul Marquez, bloodied and taking a beating, managed to take a split decision over Keith Mullings and retain his IBF junior middleweight title.